TGS 2006: Harvest Moon DS: The Island I Develop With You

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Marvelous brings the farmer back for a much more DS-like Harvest Moon.

By Nix

The series is already three-deep on the Nintendo DS handheld (including the spin-off Rune Factory as well as the more traditional game recently released in America), but this third Harvest Moon may be the most compelling DS entry yet. Marvelous Interactive has overhauled the graphics engine fully this time, and also will be incorporating more touchscreen gameplay. For those of us snobs who passed on the last game because of its outdated graphics and frustrating dearth of touch play (somehow, a farming game and a touchscreen seem like they should go hand-in-hand, but that wasn't the case the first time out), this Harvest Moon should be much better nutrient for your growing game library.

Harvest Moon: The Island I Develop With You ditches the GBA graphics of the first Harvest Moon for more 3D and large-scale rendering. The game doesn't switch to the full-3D seen in recent GameCube and PS2 versions of the series (you can't rotate your view, for instance, and the characters are really ACM rendered sprites instead of polygonal figures), but the added character detail and animation alone makes this a much more pleasing game to stare at as you head out for the fields. The top screen of the demo was used to explain the controls of the game, but screenshots in the TGS pamphlet show simple status meters for your character on the top screen.

This Harvest Moon is now also stylus-driven, where the plucky blonde farmer follows your cursor to where you need him to go. Most of the gameplay is still button-driven, but now because the stylus is used for control, the developers have modified the tool control so that it's easier to choose and use tools without having to drop your stylus. Here, the D-Pad or right buttons (it's friendly to lefties in that way) are your quick-access bar for chosen tools, so you will tap the button/direction for the item you wish to use and then tap it again repeatedly where appropriate to use that tool in action. Admittedly, this is still shallow use of the touchscreen in that it's really just a new way of controlling characters with standard button pressing for tasks that could use the touchpad, but the stylus control does make the game more enjoyable to play, and we're hoping that maybe there will be some stylus-driven functions for more challenging farm work that puts the touchscreen to even better use.

As we've previously stated about this new series entry, the game takes place on an island that will slowly evolve as you play the game and the story evolves, and we saw in screenshots some simple implementation of this effect -- a bridge can be built across a river later in the game, for instance. The game ships in Japan this December, so look for import impressions of the final game in a few months.